Peter Harrison's Reading List

"This book is a classic. In a way, this was the work that articulated what’s often referred to as ‘the complexity thesis’. It opposes simplistic conflict narratives and indeed simplistic harmony narratives that say that everything was always sweetness and light between religion and science. By looking very carefully at specific historical episodes, Brooke shows that the story is really complicated. We have some instances of conflict, but we also have episodes where it’s clear that religious factors were important for getting certain scientific views up and running, by motivating scientists, by providing essential presuppositions, and so on. And for at least some of time, science and religion just don’t have that much to do with each other. I think much of the story in the last couple of centuries has been that they go their own paths independently with only a few points of tension. “We have some instances of conflict, but we also have episodes where it’s clear that religious factors were important for getting certain scientific views up and running” John Brooke was not the only person to make this sort of argument. At the University of Wisconsin, two historians—David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers—had a 1986 collection of essays called God and Nature that also ran a similar thesis. So, a number of historians had been coming up with this notion of the complexity of science-religion relations, but John’s book is the authoritative statement of this notion of historical complexity. I think so. My own view is that there is more to the harmony story than to the conflict story. If we ask why science emerged in the West when it did, religion gives us much of the answer to that question. If you want to know what the key cultural ingredients are needed to get something like a scientific culture up and running and, crucially, give it social legitimacy, religion provides an important element of that. But there are crude versions of the harmony story that I think are problematic as the conflict narratives. I also think you’re correct to point out that John’s work—and the complexity thesis in general—have sometimes been read as an advocating of harmony by those who want to keep arguing for the conflict story. But they are not. An example of this would be Yves Gingras’ recent book Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue , where he accuses historians of being religious apologists. That’s complete nonsense, but it’s indicative of the fact that simply challenging the conflict myth often leads to the perception of necessarily advocating some sort of harmony. It’s partly a descriptive claim because very often science and religion go their own way. But you can’t avoid the fact that if the propositional claims of the various religions are true, then empirically they must make some difference to how the world is. There will necessarily be some touchpoints in that case because science deals with the empirical facts. Unless a religion is restricted purely to the realm of the moral, it will make at least some substantive claims about empirical reality. The independence view seems quite attractive, but it’s not quite right. And in someone like Stephen Jay Gould’s view, science takes what it wants and whatever is left over is dealt with by religion. So it’s not without its problems, not least because there are points of contact that can’t be avoided. That’s right. Part of the reason for that is that the contingencies of history and the fact that scientific theories change over time. Taking the long view, you can’t predict in advance that science and religion will always be independent and there’s never any possibility of contact. Historically, it depends on what scientists might be claiming at a particular time."

"As you say, it’s a classic sociological work. What I like about it is that Merton looks at a relatively constrained case of a specific time period in a specific place. He’s trying to explain why we get this efflorescence of scientific activity in England in the middle decades of the 17th century. This is when the Royal Society was founded, and considerable progress was made towards establishing the foundations of early modern science. Merton offers us a middle-range theory, as he would call it. It’s not a grand theory, but he’s not giving up on offering a proper explanation for what’s going on. What’s particularly interesting is that he treats science itself as a kind of ‘black box’ and focuses on external factors and, crucially, values. He argues that Puritan values were important to setting up science and justifying scientific practice. That’s the key thing about this book. He understands that more generally, social values are crucial to the legitimation of science. That means it’s not just to do with the inherent internal logic of science as something that is somehow self-evidently true. That’s not how you make science successful—it’s something external to the sciences that leads us to value them, that makes scientific advance possible, and that makes science an important and central feature of society. Why this question is so vital to this very day is that science is undergoing challenges to its legitimacy. It’s simply not enough for a scientist to rehearse the chorus ‘well, we’re scientists and this is what the science tells us’; they have to understand the role played by values in giving legitimacy to what they’re doing. I should add that there’s a number of difficulties with Merton’s book around some of the specifics. He wanted to argue that it was a puritan ethos that was distinctive for the rise of modern science. I think there are difficulties with who gets to be identified as ‘puritan’ and so on, but the general approach is very fruitful. That’s a good question. I think it does generalise. Stephen Gaukroger is a historian and philosopher of science at the University of Sydney who is writing a long series of books on the emergence of the scientific culture in the West. What Gaukroger argues—rightly, in my view—is that part of the explanation for why we have science in the West is to do to with these issues of religious legitimation. The contrast cases are the boom-bust patterns where scientific activity gets started in China, medieval Arabic cultures, and ancient Greece, but does not consolidate into a central and ensuring part of the culture. So, the question is not just about the origins of science, but also about its consolidation. That then leads to the question of social legitimacy, which then takes us to the question of which cultural values underpin science. For me in the West, it is religious values that helped give science a boost and consolidate its position as a legitimate and important activity. That’s another reason I like this book—Merton put his finger on something that is more generalisable than the specific case he dealt with. It’s not a problem for Merton, but it is a problem for the more general story that I’ve just told. He would be completely unembarrassed by that because he was focussing on a very particular time and place. But moving from the specific case to the more general argument takes a lot of work. I don’t think you can say that it is just Protestantism alone that’s responsible for modern science. We have key Catholic thinkers like Galileo and Descartes (whose contributions are often underrated). “The question is not just about the origins of science, but also about its consolidation” But interestingly both Galileo and Descartes ran into difficulties with the Catholic Church. Things were more difficult for them. Protestantism in one sense was more open to new ideas than Catholicism and it was easier for Protestants to attack authorities like Aristotle than it was for Catholics. And that made a difference. We need to remember that the Reformation is a Catholic movement. It originates within Catholicism. And then Catholicism has its own Reformation, or as it’s sometimes called the ‘Counter-Reformation’. The other thing we need to understand is that the Protestant Reformation has unintended consequences that change the whole face of Europe. When we talk about the role of Protestantism and the rise of science, we’re not simply speaking about specific Protestant doctrines or practices. We’re talking about what happens to the West as a consequence of the Reformation. To return to the general question about Christianity and why the scientific revolution wasn’t earlier, then, the Protestant Reformation is part of that story. But there are other factors, in including material ones. Nothing much is happening after the fall of Rome until we get the rise of the universities in the 13th century. But this hiatus owes more to material factors than ideological ones. Then, when the universities do get up and running, the intellectual environment is dominated by Aristotelian natural philosophy. Here again, the Reformation plays some role, because it gives people the scope to reject that synthesis of Aristotle and Christian theology so powerfully articulated by thinkers like Thomas Aquinas. Protestant Reformers attacked Aristotle as a pagan influence on Christianity, which needed to be purged from the tradition. That then gave legitimacy to a rejection of Aristotelian natural philosophy, which made space for other ways of understanding the natural world, including the theories of the new sciences. It’s a good question. As an intellectual historian, I deal in the realm of ideas, but there are material practices that are really important, along with the development of specific technologies. The invention of the telescope is one good example. Without the telescope, would these things have happened? What about the printing press? We get networks of communication, we get new technologies, and we have the capacity to make new instruments, like the air pump that individuals like Robert Boyle put to good use. So, there’s a range of material factors that are really quite important. While these are not part of my purview, I’m quite happy to acknowledge them as key."

"This book came out in the 1980s, even before John Brooke’s complexity thesis. It’s a powerful statement of continuities in medieval thinking about divine omnipotence—the all-powerfulness of God—and how this idea played out in very interesting ways in the formation of modern science. At a time when no one was really talking much about how specific theological ideas may have had an impact on the emergence of modern science, Funkenstein’s book is a milestone. We can go back to Merton for the sociological stuff, but in terms of the specific theological ideas, we can go to Funkenstein. It is a real masterpiece. His knowledge of the sources is really impressive, in showing how these ideas and debates of the operations of God’s power in the world had a direct impact on scientific thinking. Let me start with omnipotence, because that’s a slightly simpler case. The concept of laws of nature is a modern concept that we see most explicitly articulated first by Descartes. Descartes talks about laws of nature as God directly impinging on natural order, immediately moving objects around in lawful fashion according to his choice of a particular set of laws. So, the idea of a law of nature is that God chooses to instantiate regularities in the world and we need to go out and discover what they are. This is very different from Aristotle’s idea that the order of the world is a function of the inherent properties that things have. To overgeneralise somewhat, with the new views of Descartes and Newton, the powers of things are stripped away—they become inert—and God has to do the work of moving things around. He does according to his own laws. The notion of divine omnipotence—that God can make any kind of world he wants and is not constrained by any other considerations—then leads to the necessity of empirically investigating the world. That’s one example: the idea of laws of nature and mathematical laws of nature which are foundational to modern science come out of the idea of divine omnipotence. Descartes is explicit about this, and so too are English thinkers like Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton , and Samuel Clark. They are very explicit that laws of nature are divine edicts. “The idea of laws of nature and mathematical laws of nature, which are foundational to modern science, come out of the idea of divine omnipotence” The omnipresence link is really quite complicated. It’s interesting because the debates that we see between Leibniz and Newton about whether space is absolute or relative actually hinge on theological questions to do with divine omnipresence. The Newtonian position is that if God is omnipotent, he must be present where he is active. His omnipresence, then, is what makes possible his acting everywhere. For Leibniz, this looks suspiciously like a form of pantheism—God has a body and that body is space. Newton comes very close to this in one edition of the Optiks where he talks about space as God’s ‘divine sensorium’ or sense organ. I think I would. I’d be inclined to say that the medieval theological background is necessary but not sufficient. That would be my view, which is a bit stronger than Funkenstein’s claim. I think the timing of the separation between the two is often got completely wrong, and Funkenstein is a good example of why that’s the case. It’s often thought that the scientific revolution takes place when science and religion are separated out. But what Funkenstein shows—and I think he’s exactly right—is that they actually come closer together in the 17th century. He talks in this context about “secular theologians”, meaning that for the first time, natural philosophers start to make theological claims and that would have been very unusual in the Middle Ages. The whole structure of the medieval university was set up so that the faculty of arts where natural philosophy was taught was separate from the theological faculties. That was done quite deliberately. Natural philosophers (scientists, we would call them) typically did not make theological claims. But in the 17th century, we find that people like Descartes, Kepler, and Newton are all making theological statements. Part of the reason for this is that theological considerations are central to the way they’re thinking about the world. So, what actually happens is that science and religion come together in the 17th century in a way that would have been very unusual in the Middle Ages. “Science and religion come together in the 17th century in a way that would have been very unusual in the Middle Ages” The question is: when do they come apart? That happens definitively in the 19th century. Why they came apart is another complicated story, but in England one of the reasons was because scientists wanted to assert their independence from ecclesiastical strictures. There was a professional component. People like Thomas Henry Huxley had an explicit mission to use science, e.g. evolutionary thinking, to liberate science and scientific institutions from theological constraint. For Huxley and his fellow travellers, the union of theology and science was a problem. And at some level I think it was. Your second question—whether it’s a good thing that they’re separate—is a hard one to answer. If those like Merton, Funkenstein and me are correct in thinking that theology was really crucial to the efflorescence of science in the 17th century, counterfactually we might ask if there is something lacking in science today that might limit its prospects. The question for me is: what makes science fruitful? Clearly, the advocacy of something like intelligent design or scientific creationism in present circumstances is absolute heresy. And I want to be clear that I am not advocating that. But I do think it’s very interesting to consider whether religious conceptions might lead to unconceived possibilities in terms of contexts of discovery. This is precisely Funkenstein’s point—that thinking about divine omnipotence and what God could possibly instantiate led to new ways of thinking about the world. This was also argued even more strongly by the French historian and philosopher of science Pierre Duhem. But we can also look at that the other way around. I wonder whether the very strong naturalism which either explicitly or implicitly shapes virtually all modern thought is in some way restrictive. Your point is that specific religious dogmas are potentially restrictive, and I think that’s absolutely right. But there’s a difference between specific religious dogmas and thinking in more elaborate theological terms about something like divine omnipotence (which is the historical case I’m thinking of). To put it this way, I don’t buy the idea that scientific naturalism is some neutral position and that the religious position is the one invested in a set of restrictive assumptions. I think naturalism is potentially just as dogmatic and restrictive."

"This book was van Fraassens’s Terry Lectures that he gave at Yale in 1999. These lectures are often devoted to topics of science and religion. What I like about this book is that very few philosophers of science have been that interested in the science-religion questions, and here we have one of the leading analytic philosophers of science attempting to grapple with those questions in a very sophisticated way. One of his targets is this strong version of naturalism or physicalism or materialism which is associated with Australian analytic philosophy—with Jack Smart and David Armstrong. He sees these guys and others as trying to mould philosophy into the image of science, as attempting to hold beliefs that lead to an implicit metaphysics. As the title of the book suggests, what he thinks philosophers of science should have is not a set of beliefs and metaphysical commitments, but rather a “stance”. For him, a stance is less dogmatic and restrictive. Take empiricism, for example: instead of focusing on the content and metaphysics of science, you look at its procedures and how it generates knowledge. I think that is a much more fruitful way for philosophers to think about science, rather than postulating normative claims about what its commitments or procedures ought to be. They should observe what’s going and see how science is constructed. This is why, interestingly, he’s somewhat sympathetic to philosophers like Paul Feyerabend who are usually seen as quite radical and relativist. Feyerabend’s famous claim is that there’s no scientific method and that ‘anything goes’. What he means by that is that if you actually look at scientific practices, you see that scientists will do whatever it takes to get the outcomes. What you won’t find is a set of tightly defined and prescriptive methods that they operate with. As a historian, I’m very sympathetic to that view, because that’s essentially what historians do. They want to look at how it is that people come to generate knowledge in real life, without dictating what the process should be. I think van Fraassen’s worry is that naturalism is a commitment that we don’t have to make. It’s not required for the success of science. The question is what the minimal things are that we need for a successful science. We understand science to be an empirical activity—scientists work in the realm of appearances. By way of contrast, claiming to know what lies behind the appearances can lead to a problematic and dogmatic metaphysics. For van Fraassen, the dominant naturalist metaphysics is one that leaves no room for human beings in our picture of the world. What will follow from that is a position that leaves religious and moral considerations out of the picture. He wants to have an understanding of the operation of science but in a way that we still have a view of the world that can still accommodate us, and along with that, ultimately, a religious dimension. The question goes to what the connection is between methodological naturalism—the stance we adopt when we do science and that excludes supernatural explanations—and the more powerful claim that naturalistic explanations are the only ones that there are, or should be. In my view, it’s illegitimate to claim that methodological naturalism entails metaphysical naturalism. There are some interesting arguments that attempt to link those together, but I don’t find them persuasive. But neither should we deny the great power of the naturalistic stance. As you say, the existence of Christian scientists who are not obviously subject to cognitive dissonance is an embarrassment for some who would claim the incompatibility of science and religion (as, for example, the New Atheists did). The fact is that there are now eminent scientists who have religious commitments, as there have always been throughout history. This is an awkward fact for advocates of the incompatibility of science and religion That’s interesting. One thing that the Galileo Affair has taught the Catholic Church is that it’s not wise to meddle in the scientific realm—that there shouldn’t be religious interference in scientific activity. I think that lesson has been learned. For me, there is the nagging question of the legitimacy of modern science and whether it needs external sets of values to support it. Although it may now seem to be largely self-sustaining in terms of the technology it generates and the knowledge it gives us, there’s a question of whether science is sustainable without a set of cultural values that support its mission. If you think about climate change scepticism, anti-vaxxers, and to some extent young-earth creationism, there are forces arrayed against it. “One thing that the Galileo Affair has taught the Catholic Church is that it’s not wise to meddle in the scientific realm” Also, government instrumentalities seem to be increasingly less willing to fund blue skies research—curiosity-driven science—and they are far more interested in specific applications. I think that’s a long-term danger to a science that sees itself exploring questions of genuine interest as opposed to just being involved in busy work to produce widgets for people who want better iPhones and so on. A better example would be improvements in health. This is not a particularly happy note to end on, but I think that if we’re too utilitarian in our approach to science—and this goes to questions of intrinsic value as opposed to utility—this could kill off genuine scientific inquiry in the long term."